“For this,” Lisa said, then underlined BITCH.
Lisa did not talk about what happened in the bedroom. Meredith realized that this may in fact have been the first time she’d even mentioned the word “bedroom.” It wasn’t every night. It was sometimes. He would come home—from where? from work?—a couple hours after dark, and maybe they’d be watching TV but more than likely they’d be in the tub. He would come in with a greasy bag from somewhere—usually Burger King but sometimes Taco Bell and sometimes KFC and once it was the plain brown paper bag from Deli Barn, which was funny for about five seconds. He’d toss the bag into the bathroom, the way you’d fling slop to pigs, and then she and Lisa would spread out the bag like a picnic blanket between them, dump all the fries into a pile, and dig in. If he was going to take a shower, then they’d go sit on the couch and watch CSI and eat and then later, back to the tub, except sometimes he came for Lisa.
It wasn’t even very scary, not anymore. (Had it ever been? Meredith could no longer recall those first days. Had it been a week yet? A month?) He’d just come into the bathroom and go, “You, get up”—just like he had that afternoon, at the Deli Barn—and Lisa would stand up and Meredith would lie down on her side and the bedroom door would click shut and then Meredith would fall asleep. And then the next day it was the same thing all over again. They had their routine, all three of them.
“What about Becca?” Meredith asked.
“What about Becca?”
“She’s not dumb.”
“Becca is the only friend I have who can actually have a conversation,” Lisa said. “That’s why I wanted her in our group, when she moved here.”
“To help with homework?”
“No.” Lisa made a tally mark under BITCH. “But, okay, yes, sometimes. But no—she’s just, you know. She just sees things smart. Smartly. She has perspective.”
“She’s in my algebra class,” Meredith said. She smiled. “She knows what an asymptote is. So you can ask her next year.”
“Ha, yeah, she knows it’s made up. Asymptote. Buttymptote.”
“It’s not made up,” Meredith said. “It’s a real thing. It’s just . . . ” She paused for dramatic effect, then waved her hands like an illusionist. “Invisible.”
“Invisible algebra? Great.”
“It’s an invisible line that you can’t cross. A curve gets right up next to it but it can’t cross it. It just almost touches it, to infinity.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s so invisible, how does the curve even know where it is?” Lisa smiled triumphantly, the way she had in the car that first day when she’d told the kidnapper to shut his mouth. “I’d like to see them explain that.”
“I guess you’ll just have to ask Becca,” Meredith said.
Lisa and Becca. Becca and Lisa. The gruesome twosome, Jules had called them. Or the twin bitches. Slut squared. Had she thought of that one herself? Maybe she had. But Lisa and Becca had deserved it—they’d made each other meaner, the two of them together some kind of weird, indefinable force, making everyone around them feel small, sometimes without a single word. Or, now that she thought about it, often without a single word. In fact, Meredith had to admit she could not recall a specific instance of Becca Nichols actually being mean to her directly, but rather an indistinct montage of superior looks and eye rolls and silent snubs.
Once, she’d been in the car with Jules and Kristy and they were complaining about Lisa and Becca. “Those bitches think they rule the world,” Jules had said, and Jules’s mother had commented, “Just so you know, they’re definitely peaking now.” Meredith had instantly recognized this as one of those things parents said to make unpopular children feel better. But surprisingly it had worked, and she and Jules and Kristy had spent a pleasant evening coming up with all the particular ways in which Lisa and her friends would be total losers as soon as next year, and then probably pregnant and divorced and poor—maybe even homeless, and certainly humiliated—right around the time they themselves were graduating from college and marrying gorgeous men.
“She’s probably my best friend,” Lisa said. “Becca. She’s definitely the person least likely to screw me over. Most of my other friends would stab me in the back in a second if they could.”
“Why are you friends with people who would stab you in the back?”
“Everyone’s friends with people who would stab them in the back,” Lisa said. “Hello? Otherwise you’d only have like one friend.”
“That’s really sad,” Meredith said.
“That’s the difference between people like you and people like me. You think everything’s sad. Because all you do is think about stuff all the time. If you only think about stuff like half the time you’re way less sad.”
“What do you do the other half of the time? When you’re not thinking?”
“Uh, I don’t know, maybe have a life?”
“It’s not like I don’t have a life,” Meredith said.
Lisa looked at her. There was the look. This was why everyone hated her. This was why middle school girls had stomachaches when they woke up in the morning. This was why girls were afraid to read the next text, or turn the corner into the cafeteria. This was why Jules could think, why they all could think, all the girls who were not her friends, why they could all secretly think:
Good riddance.
?
There was a police car parked in front of their house. Meredith slowed almost to a stop when she saw it from a block away. A police car could mean a lot of things, and none of them were good. At Lisa’s house that day, Mrs. Bellow had told them that she was always waiting for the phone to ring, but that whenever it rang she was afraid to answer it. Now Meredith understood why Mrs. Bellow didn’t want to answer the phone.
Detective Waller and Detective Thorn were standing on her front porch. It looked like they had just rung the bell. As she approached she could see that Detective Thorn was holding a slim manila folder. On television, slim manila folders held photos of corpses. Sometimes the photo was just a pale face, other times a whole body, in whatever position and condition it had been discovered.
“Hi,” she said.
“There you are,” Detective Waller said, turning. “We were just ringing the bell.”
“Nobody’s home,” she said.
“Where are your parents?” Detective Thorn asked.
“At work.”
“You come home alone?”
“Usually,” she said.
They exchanged looks, as if this might be important information. In truth, Evan was supposed to be home where she got here, and normally was. Since he’d started working out again, she’d beaten him home a couple times.
“We’ve got something we want you to look at,” Detective Thorn said. He slid a photo out of his folder. “You know we’ve got Lisa’s phone. We’ve identified everyone in her pictures, except one person. Nobody seems to know who he is.”